Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

With the recent news of Sun Microsystems buying MySQL AB for one billion dollars (insert Dr.Evil’s evil laugh here), I hear plenty calling Sun the largest contributor to open source. I beg to differ.

Sun is doing a lot for open source, there is no argument about it, and whatever they do is much appreciated. But calling them the largest contributor to open source, is a little bit too far fetched, I think. First of all, let’s see what we are talking about. Here is the list of open source stuff from Sun (according to their open source initiative page):

• Solaris Enterprise System / OpenSolaris
• Linux from Sun
• StarOffice / OpenOffice.org
• NetBeans
• OpenSPARC
• Java

That’s something, but doesn’t qualify for the number one contributor. First of all, these are mostly Sun’s own offerings. Secondly, some of these (Java and OpenSolaris) have been opened to be saved. They were open when it was pretty much obvious to everyone that if they are not, they aren’t going to last very long. Or, at least, they won’t prosper as they should. Thirdly, the effort that was put in some of these (StarOffice / OpenOffice.org) by Sun isn’t all that impressive. I mean, yeah, they bought and opened StarOffice. People jumped on it and started to improve it. And it improved a lot. But it’s still huge, bloated, and clunky, after all these years…

As I said, it’s still appreciated. There is plenty of good in Sun’s open source initiative. But I think there are companies that have done more good to open source than Sun did. I think that IBM did a great deal more. And it did it before anyone else, when open source needed help the most. Then, I think Google has done plenty and is still doing a lot. And, I think it’s not fair at all to forget Red Hat. These guys made a lot of money on open source software, but they were more than willing to share and invest those money back into the community.

(Side note: punctuation in product names sure makes headlines confusing)

Mashable has a post about upcoming Yahoo Life!

The premise is this: take Yahoo Mail, and make it the hub of your daily online activities; turn e-mail addresses into social profiles; connect e-mail to other services, and use the info from the contacts in these services according to the context.

This sounds good.  This sounds like exactly what I need.  Of course, there is a “but”:

It sounds and looks great, but we can’t know how well it works until the product actually goes live.

OK, we have to wait and see.  But I see that this niche will get a bit crowded pretty soon.  With all those web services and social networks more and more people are coming online.  Social connections will be more and more important, and therefor we’ll see more and more tools that do this.  There are some specialized tools for these purposes already, but none of them have enough functionality and momentum to lead the way yet.  Hopefully it will change sooner than later.  And, hopefully, Google will play some major role in this too…

My favorite (so far) programming language has been born 20 years ago.   It’s been loved and hated.  It’s been praised and damned.  It’s been complimented and criticized.  But all that doesn’t matter.  What matters is that it has been helping people all over the world to solve problems.  Tricky, boring, annoying problems.  It provided enough power to build enterprise grade applications, while still being easy and flexible enough to be the super-glue of many systems.

I’m sure Perl will still be with us in another 20 years.  I wish it to be as useful in that time, as it is now.

Thanks, respect, and best wishes to everyone who created and supported Perl, its community and tools all these years.  Happy birthday!

Wagamama franchise opened the doors of its first food spot in Cyprus.  Located in Nicosia, close to other famous food brands like Starbucks, Pizza Hut, Costa, and Burger King, it’s the first of the planned three restaurants.  Financial Mirror provides some details, such as:

Noodles are also the ideal fast food offering a nutritionally complete meal in a bowl, in addition to the rice dishes and a range of fresh juices, while for the hungry, the restaurant offers a variety of side dishes including meat and vegetable dumplings, skewered chicken, deep-fried prawns and raw salads.

Flickr Blog has two good news:

1. Flickr Uploadr 3.0 is available.  Those of you using Flickr Uploadr to send pictures to you Flickr photo stream might want  to upgrade.  The new version offers a bunch of handy functionality, such as tagging, naming, and describing photos, as well as reordering.  These are much faster to do on your computer than over the network, so it should speed up your processing quite a bit.
2. Statistics for Pro accounts.  If you have a Pro account, you can enable statistics and enjoy some graphs.  It takes about 24 hours for the stats to appear once you enable them, so be a little patient.  Finally, you’ll know  how people are finding your pictures, where from they are coming, and what are looking at the most.